Comment by artellectual | Hacker News Reader

Comment by artellectual | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who works as a leader of a tech team building a financial engine, from my personal experience. When teams are doing overtime it means some bad management happened somewhere. Either someone under-estimated the scope and was never adjusted / communicated, or someone couldn't keep promise of not changing things as a result the developers and final product suffer.

Software projects are very difficult to estimate. Especially when you are building 'one of a kind' products. How do you give an estimate of something you've never built. You may know how efficient your team is at building a past product but you do not know about the upcoming problems you will face when building something new.

After working on a project for sometime you have a better idea and give better estimates however pinning 'deadlines' on a 'one of a kind' product never works out.

This is just another one of those cases. They should have just released the PC version first, and the other consoles could have come later. It would have been a better release for everyone and a better product.

Having engineers work overtime also is generally quite bad. Engineers are humans they get tired, when they're tired they make more mistakes. I guess it shows very clearly in this game all the 'mistakes' the developers made.

How long did they spend making this game? And to rush it at the last minute to hit a 'deadline' and to have an outcome like this. Was it worth it?

Let's not forget that games are actually just way more than software products. Sure, you need to write a lot of software, but you also need to figure out good gameplay, setting, mood of the game, design levels, create a shitton of art, have actors act in mocap etc. etc.

Games are most likely biggest and most complex "artistic" projects on earth (certainly they dwarf movie production). And doing artistic things is harder than typical software development for e.g. banks, where you have clearly stated requirements, whereas in games the requirement don't go beyond "it has to be cool and play great". Both of these can often only be verified in advanced stages of development, which leads to big delays where company heads realize that the game they've been developing for the past 4 years is indeed sucky and needs a huge revamp...

It seems like in the games industry they really want to advertise release dates or at least a release window for marketing purposes. Which results in the bad cruch periods, since you can only delay so much once you've stamped that date on it. This happens all the time, but this is an exceptionally bad example.

On the one hand, I wish companies wouldn't do this kind of crap, but on the other hand, the consumers need to be more responsible. This game has already made back the development costs, so all this backlash will probably amount to nothing. It's harsh to say, but gamers will seemingly believe anything the marketing machine tells them hook line and sinker.

Exactly and this whole thing really solidifies the concept of never giving out specific deadlines unless you've basically completed the product and just doing minor touchups and even then you _still_ pad it by 2x.

The problem however is that execs want exact dates and meanwhile marketing is just hyping up the product which yields to crazy expectations from consumers and this forces the engineers to even more crunch and degrade the quality of the whole thing. Vicious cycle indeed.

Then there's the opposite problem too, where absent of any deadline, you get Duke Nukem Forever.

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